Re: Why progressives were desperate to believe Jason Arday

On 04/08/2026 21:12, Julian wrote:
> On 04/08/2026 20:00, Julian wrote:
>> The Jason Arday affair has been a great revealer. On the one hand, it 
>> is a glorious romp that has brought much-needed mirth to the nation. 
>> On the other, the exposure of Professor Arday isn’t really about the 
>> guileless Arday himself, but the establishment that elevated him. It 
>> has served up a moment of unavoidable clarity in which the nonsense of 
>> progressivism stands exposed like the imperial scrotum.
>>
>> It is a perfect storm. We have a fantasist in an environment where, 
>> for political and social status reasons, everyone takes his claims at 
>> face value, or pretends that they do because to express doubt would be 
>> to invite unwanted attention. In such fertile ground the fantasist’s 
>> claims (which he continues to deny fabricating) inevitably become 
>> increasingly outlandish – epic marathon runs, prophetic blessings, an 
>> appearance in a television programme that began 20 years before he was 
>> born – because he is increasingly secure that they will never be 
>> questioned. This is what inevitably occurs when a fantasist encounters 
>> people who want, for whatever reason, to believe his fantasies.
>>
>> It can be quite uncanny to see a fantasist at work. I once heard of a 
>> TV project that met for its first big production meeting. It was only 
>> then, after weeks of prep across different departments, that it 
>> gradually occurred to everybody that the show hadn’t actually been 
>> commissioned. The writer had just told everybody that it had. And 
>> they’d wanted to believe.
>>
>> Arday himself can hardly be blamed for this scandal. Like Puff the 
>> magic dragon, he is notable only for the effect he had on others. Who 
>> would dare to speak up against a wunderkind that made a lot of 
>> powerful people feel better about themselves? Like love, mediocrity 
>> will always find a way. DEI is its great enabler, but this can never 
>> be acknowledged.
>>
>> Even now we can see the reluctance of Arday’s cheerleaders to throw in 
>> the towel. LBC’s James O’Brien, for example, who at the height of 
>> Arday’s fame nodded along to his rambling tosh, is currently fighting 
>> a desperate rearguard action, telling his Bluesky followers that the 
>> Telegraph and the Times have crossed the line into ‘studied [and] 
>> deliberate ignominy’ with their Arday stories. I love how O’Brien goes 
>> all Victorian in his vocabulary on these occasions. He must think it 
>> makes him look very serious. He goes on, ‘If there is any case to 
>> answer here, it is about Liverpool John Moore’s supervisory failure of 
>> an obviously unique PhD student. Something, I imagine, their own 
>> exhaustive investigation concluded… [it] would be comical if the 
>> motivation of Jason’s enemies were not so hideously obvious.’
>>
>> Like all of Arday’s fans, O’Brien’s only remaining option is to throw 
>> murky aspersions of racism on the people who have revealed him to be 
>> such a colossal, credulous prat.
>>
>> And of course, O’Brien has form on this as long as your arm, with his 
>> enthusiastic vaunting of the claims of the fantasist and later 
>> convicted paedophile Carl Beech. In both cases, O’Brien wanted very 
>> badly to believe a very obvious fantasy.
>>
>> Such scandals can often be mistaken optimistically for an end to the 
>> whole shebang of  progressive nonsense – for who could ever take them 
>> seriously again? But the roots of progressivism are too deeply 
>> embedded in the soil of public life. These hilarious exposures – see 
>> also Jussie Smollett – are not strong enough to dislodge them. The 
>> daring young man on the flying trapeze may fall to the ground with a 
>> splat, but the progressive circus is so big that it just moves on.
>>
>> People who want to believe are easy marks for the not-very-good and 
>> delusional. The Labour party is currently in the grip of just such a 
>> mania. Andy Burnham is only another kind of fantasist. According to 
>> him, after all, the big problems facing Britain in 2026 are Mrs 
>> Thatcher, Sainsbury’s and not enough mayors. Is that really much less 
>> bizarre than Arday’s claims? It feels a bit like he’s pulled three 
>> things out of a hat. Another dip would have brought up unicycles, 
>> Toyah and not enough people called Steve. And on the right, enough 
>> people want to believe in Rupert Lowe as the next prime minister, 
>> despite his actual status as nothing much more than an electoral 
>> irritant to Reform.
>>
>> As Arday shows, we need safeguards against that common human failing: 
>> ignoring the truth in favour of what we’d prefer to be real.
>>
>>
>> Gareth Roberts
> 
> Scotland Yard investigated a journalist trying to expose a plagiarism 
> row and told him to stop asking a Cambridge professor questions.
> 
> Jack Grove, a reporter for Times Higher Education (THE), was accused of 
> harassment after he emailed a series of questions to Prof Jason Arday 
> about his academic record. Mr Grove said officers told him to stop 
> contacting the professor because his “mental health” had been affected 
> by the questions.
> 
> Prof Arday also hired the law firm Carter-Ruck, which suggested in a 
> letter to THE that its “apparent attack” on him “may be... racially 
> motivated”.
> 
> The Metropolitan Police spent four months looking into the claim of 
> harassment before deciding in February to close the case.
> 
> The police did not interview Mr Grove, who only found out about the 
> investigation when the Met contacted him to inform him that they would 
> not be taking action.
> 
> The Met also reportedly passed on a complaint to another force about an 
> academic who was also looking into the academic record of Prof Arday, 
> but the other force refused to investigate.
> 
> The Met is among forces that have been accused in recent months of 
> wasting time on pointless investigations while insisting that they do 
> not have the manpower to routinely attend burglaries and other crimes.
> 
> Mr Grove told The Telegraph that he had been “stunned” to receive a 
> phone call from the police to be told he had been investigated simply 
> for doing his job.
> 
> He said: “I was told a complaint had been made against me and 
> investigated, but the force was not taking it forward. The officer told 
> me that I shouldn’t contact Professor Arday again because his mental 
> health had been affected by my actions.
> 
> “I asked him what I had done, and he said there had been online posts 
> about Professor Arday. I said I’d never posted anything about him and 
> asked him if he realised he was speaking to a journalist who was 
> investigating a story. He didn’t really respond but repeated his request 
> for me not to contact Professor Arday again, citing his mental health.
> 
> “I was just doing my job. Journalists should be free to ask questions of 
> anyone, even star professors. It’s very rare that academics refuse to 
> speak to the press – that caused me to look into this matter further and 
> I was astonished by what I found.”
> 
> Mr Grove had started looking into Prof Arday’s background after being 
> tipped off by academics who had found apparent evidence of plagiarism in 
> his work.
> 
> He emailed Prof Arday and Cambridge University, as well as Liverpool 
> John Moores University – which had awarded him his PhD – to ask 
> questions about the apparent overlap with another student’s PhD. He also 
> asked questions about Prof Arday’s claims of raising £5.5m for charity 
> through seemingly improbable feats of ultra-distance running.
> 
> That prompted the letter from Carter-Ruck in September last year, and in 
> November last year a formal complaint of harassment was made to the 
> police. Mr Grove has never been told who made the complaint.
> 
> The university denied it was them.
> 
> Separately, The Guardian reported that the Met passed on a complaint of 
> harassment to Devon and Cornwall Police that had been made about a 
> professor at Plymouth Marjon University.
> 
> Prof David Harris had contacted Cambridge with his own concerns about 
> Prof Arday’s work, which triggered the complaint to the Met. Devon and 
> Cornwall Police refused to investigate, The Guardian reported.
> 
> A spokesman for the Met said: “On 18 November 2025, the Met received an 
> allegation of harassment. The case was closed in February this year.”
> 
> A spokesman for Cambridge University said: “The university did not make 
> any complaint to the police against Jack Grove in 2025. Neither was it 
> aware of any such complaint being made.”
> 
> Prof Arday was contacted for comment.
> 
> Prof Arday has, in recent days, put his apparent plagiarism down to 
> autism, saying he absorbs information through mimicry.
> 
> He has also admitted that a claim about running 600 miles in six days 
> for charity was wrong (saying it took 12 days) and has said that he did 
> not single-handedly raise £5.5m for charity but was part of a syndicate 
> of around 100 people, none of whom he can name because he signed a non- 
> disclosure agreement.
> 
> It also emerged on Tuesday that Prof Arday falsely claimed to have been 
> a visiting professor at Ohio State University.
> 
> On the Cambridge Faculty of Education page, he claims to be a visiting 
> professor at the US university in the Office of Diversity and Inclusion.
> 
> However, a university spokesman said they had “no record of an employee 
> by that name” and that “visiting professors appear in our employment 
> records”.
> 
> Ohio State’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion also closed last year.
> 
> It comes a day after Glasgow University denied Prof Arday’s claims that 
> he was a visiting professor in the university’s School of Education.
> 
> Non-crimes
> 
> Police forces around the country have been accused of wasting resources 
> on investigating non-crimes.
> 
> Avon and Somerset Police arrested an evangelical pastor for “inciting 
> religious hatred” after he gave a sermon criticising Islam and 
> transgender ideology, before deciding to take no action.
> 
> Police in Hertfordshire arrested the parents of a nine-year-old girl in 
> 2025 after they made “disparaging” comments about her primary school in 
> a WhatsApp group. The investigation was dropped five weeks later.
> 
> In 2020, Scotland Yard investigated Darren Grimes, the conservative 
> commentator, on suspicion of inciting racial hatred after he released an 
> interview with Dr David Starkey, the historian, about the slave trade. 
> The force later accepted no offence had taken place.
> 
> 
> Gordon Rayner
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SP1YZ-LtDM8